Science and Tech

Juan Botero Juan Botero and his Halloween front door The door of Juan Botero’s apartment in Houston, Texas is made of wood – with a classy, walnut-like finish. But, for Halloween, he planned an eye-catching change. “I’m going to paint my door orange,” Mr Botero, founder and chief executive of Colombia-based Glasst, told the BBC last month. And he has …

A Russian court has fined Google two undecillion roubles – a two followed by 36 zeroes – for restricting Russian state media channels on YouTube. In dollar terms that means the tech giant has been told to pay $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Despite being one of the world’s wealthiest companies, that is considerably more than the $2 trillion Google is worth. In fact, …

The Chinese electric vehicle giant BYD has seen its quarterly revenues soar, beating Tesla’s for the first time. It posted more than 200bn yuan ($28.2bn, £21.8bn) in revenues between July and September. This is a 24% jump from the same period last year, and more than Elon Musk’s company whose quarterly revenue was $25.2bn. However, Tesla still sold more electric …

Chatbot versions of the teenagers Molly Russell and Brianna Ghey have been found on Character.ai – a platform which allows users to create digital versions of people. Molly Russell took her life at the age of 14 after viewing suicide material online while Brianna Ghey, 16, was murdered by two teenagers in 2023. The foundation set up in Molly Russell’s …

BBC Some users on X who spend their days sharing content that includes election misinformation, AI-generated images and unfounded conspiracy theories say they are being paid “thousands of dollars” by the social media site. The BBC identified networks of dozens of accounts that re-share each other’s content multiple times a day – including a mix of true, unfounded, false and …

Intel was once unrivalled as the world’s chip maker. Now it’s fallen behind its rivals.

The surging global popularity of TikTok has seen the co-founder of its parent company, ByteDance, become China’s richest person. According to a rich list produced by the Hurun Research Institute, Zhang Yiming is now worth $49.3bn (£38bn) – 43% more than in 2023. The 41-year-old stepped down from his role in charge of the company in 2021, but is understood …

After a long wait, Apple has finally released its artificial intelligence (AI) tools for iPhone – to a select few. Apple Intelligence, a suite of AI tools announced in June, became available to owners of some iPhones around the world on Monday. The new features include notification summaries, tools to assist users in writing messages, and a glowing new interface …

Instagram has revealed that it lowers the quality of older, less popular videos – reserving higher quality for more popular content. Adam Mosseri, head of the Meta-owned social media platform said on Sunday “we bias to higher quality… for creators who drive more views”. He said Instagram reduces the quality of videos that have not been watched for a long …

A Scottish children’s hospital charity has introduced a gamer in residence for young patients in Glasgow. The new job involves visiting children to play video games with them, preventing boredom and providing some light relief. Steven Mair, who was appointed by the Glasgow Children’s Hospital Charity, says gaming has already provided huge benefits to the patients. He said that playing …